The Week of the Bleeding Checkbook

 I hate to make phone calls. Always have, always will. It takes me days to work up the courage, even then they get moved from one ‘To Do’ list to another until I get the job done. I usually save a bunch of calls to make back to back because my ‘courage days’ don’t come around all that often. I needed to schedule appointments for fall maintains jobs around the house and since the businesses all got called within an hour of one another the appointments all got on my day planner one day after another. Side note: My husband was surgically attached to his phone and hated to write letters. I love writing letters and treat my phone like its Typhoid Mary. It was a match made in heaven.

First came the carpet cleaners and $225 later I had three rooms cleaned, Scotch-Garded and deodorized. My carpets are a light grey, commercial grade that have held up well and that Scotch-gard treatment is well worth the extra charge because it keeps the dog’s vomit sitting right on the top and easy to clean with a little Resolve Pet Cleaner. Levi vomits more than all the other dogs I’ve ever had put together but he hates the foods the vet suggests for dogs with touchy stomachs. Mr. Carpet Cleaner, by the way, told me Nature’s Miracle Cleaner is better than Resolve.

Next came a new house cleaning service. After I lost my old service, I had decided not to replace them and do my own cleaning again, but this company fell in my lap when I mentioned the loss to the son-I-wish-I-had. “My sister has a service,” he told me. Color me embarrassed because I didn’t even remember he has a sister! Turns out she not only has a cleaning service but she covers the entire county. She sends out two person teams and they were in and out in an hour for only $50. But the cherry on the top was the fact that they get down on their hands and knees to scrub floors. My old service wouldn’t do that---I asked. They’d just spray some cleaner on the floor then use a microfiber mop to blend all the dirt together. My new, rock star cleaner changed the water pail five times in my kitchen. This on a floor that had so-called been cleaned a month ago by my old service. It looks so good now! It hadn’t been scrubbed on hands and knees since before my husband died when I could crawl up the side of his wheelchair (with him in it) to get off the floor. Having two fake knees and a bad elbow puts a crimp on any activity that requires me to be on the floor or ground…cleaning, gardening, laying out quilt blocks, reading the Sunday newspaper, filming commercials where I get to say, "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up!"

The following day was Sump Pump day. It costs $165 just to have the plumbing company come out to check it and for another $200 to replace it. It was out of warranty and even though it was working "okay," he said, I wasn’t about to take a chance on another basement flooding. Once was enough. Weighing the $365 up against the $3,000 cost of having another flooded basement pumped out the decision was easy.

The last maintenance service call was to get ready for our Michigan winter, the yearly furnace check that they suck you into getting with a $98 coupon. I’ve used the same company for years so I knew in recent years they'd often find something they can replace so they can tack on a few extra bucks. My furnace is eighteen years old so whatever petty part they say needs replacing I go for it rather than spend the winter worrying it will let me down when we’re having near zero temperatures outside. This year it was suggested that instead of waiting for a break down, I should be proactive and replace the blower motor and inducer motor at a cost of $1,275. Wow, I was not used to hearing numbers that high! I told him I'd take my chances but that next day I reversed that decision and called them back. A housing inspector---next year when I sell the place---will discover those motors are only working at 80% and I'm worried a buyer could demand I put in a new furnace for $6,000+ and what happens if the pandemic causes shortages should one of those motors belly out on me this winter? It also makes sense for me to continue doing what I'd normally do to maintain the house until the day I close on it, take no shortcuts because who knows what might happen down the road in these uncertain times we're living through.

Most of my life I was spoiled when it came to doing home maintenance. Between my dad and my husband they could do any project around a house. With nearly two decades since my husband's stroke and me being in charge of hiring everything done I find myself smiling every time I get to say to myself, “That’s the last time I’ll ever have to do that!” And I’ve been saying it a lot during my week of the bleeding checkbook. By this time next year I’ll just have to call maintenance to do everything from changing a light bulb to hanging a TV to fixing a washing machine. If only they would add dog vomit removal to their menu of services I’d be happy camper.  ©

The Doctor and the Realtor

 

My appointments with the doctor and realtor happened two weeks ago but at the time I had other stuff that had to published in a timely manner or be trashed or break my rule about posting no more than twice a week. I didn’t want to trash my stress induced reaction post to the election or my essay about my 1,000^th post, so here I am trying to remember the details about my above mentioned appointments.

I had to see my internist for my bi-annual and the Medical Care Wellness Check where they ask you questions we older people have learned to lie about. No, I don't have any throw rugs that can trip me, doctor dearest. How's my sex life? Only in my head, doc, but I have lots of book boyfriends if that counts. That sex life answer wasn't a lie if I'd actually said it out loud. Instead, I mumbled something about being a long-time widow. It ticks me off that they actually ask it because the medical community never cared back in the days when I was sexually active so why should it matter to them now in our Medicare years? If I had answered that I was playing the hide the bologna game on a regular basis would I have then gotten the safe sex talk? If you've done the Medicare Care test you know they ask some stupid stuff and thank goodness they don't hook us up on lie detector machines while we take it.

I was a little concerned that I was developing lung issues because I’ve been experiencing shortness of breath since I saw him last. Apparently I’m not good at self-diagnosing, even with Dr. Google’s help, because I thought it might be from gaining too many pandemic/comfort food pounds combined with wearing face masks. But my lungs were fine and my internist was more concerned with the fact that I’ve picked up an extra heart beat since I last saw him. He hooked up the EKG machine and that put a technical name of ‘ventricular ectopy and DOE’ to the extra heartbeat. Then he ordered a few blood tests to rule out stuff like anemia. Turned out my RBC (red blood count) came back on the low end of the scale but still one point within the normal range and my doctor says he’s comfortable with waiting until my next bi-annual to have me wear a Holter monitor (echo-cardiogram) for a few days to see what I’m doing when I get short of breath. I don’t need to wear one to know it happens when I jog a few yards with the dog, walk up hills and go shopping at the acres big grocery store---but he made me promise to call if I start getting dizzy or feeling faint with the breathing issue. Stress and lack of sleep can feed into the equation Dr. Google said, so hopefully as the nation heals those factors might resolve themselves. Ya, I know hope and two cents will give me something to wear in a pair of penny loafers. Off topic, but I remember going on a date in high school and my mom having me put dimes in my penny loafers in case I had to phone home. Phone booths and dimes to make a call...those days are long gone.

And, oh goody my doctor wants me to work on losing my pandemic pounds. A month or so before I saw him I’d already started cutting sugar out of my diet but I got side-tracked when the tricker-or-treaters didn’t show up. I used to get around 140 kids on good weather days and 70-80 when it's cold and rainy and since the township didn’t cancel the tradition because of the pandemic I bought enough for 75 kids. Fifteen showed up leaving me with a month of eating two pieces of candy a day. I’ve always hated Halloween for starting me on a sugar binge that would last until New Year’s Day. Not going to happen this year. Fingers crossed I stick to the two a day plan. I'm calling them multivitamins because I'm very careful with medications.

New topic: What did I get myself into? The son-I-wish-I-had wanted me to talk to his realtor friend even though he knew I liked another firm I’d had a walk through with---two lovely women in their 50s who specialize in dealing with senior citizens. Tim and his guy do a lot of business back and forth and he has known him for years, trusts him. So I had an appointment with the guy and I thought it would just be a quick walk through, meet-and-greet appointment like I had with the two women. Didn’t turn out that way. He’s been here twice. The first time with a presentation selling his history and experience and doing the walk through and he left a large, expensive looking leather notebook full of reading material on how to get your house ready to show, blah, blah, blah and the clever little devil wanted to schedule a second appointment "to swing by to pick the notebook back up."

At that second appointment he gave me so much information that my eyes and legs were crossed before he left and I think they killed a tree just to make all the papers he left behind. Homework, he told me of multiple page listings of the past 30 comparable houses that have sold in my neighborhood including all their interior photos. Plus he left every public record to be found on my house including aerial photos and Google street maps shots and some he took which he used to create a sample listing showing a breakdown of what I'd net out of a sale. I hate wasting paper and that stack of listings gave me the heebie jeebies as I sat there trying to decide how I could use the back sides of all those pages.

Dilemma time. I really liked the women but I'd be going on pure instinct since I don’t know anyone who’s used them. And while the guy wasn’t so aggressive that he turned me off, I thought he had just enough aggressiveness to give him an edge on selling my house. Leaning toward him, I thought I'd have a few months to decide between the two realtors but the day after that second appointment I got a greeting card in the mail from one of the lady realtors saying she’d seen the progress done on my future home and thought of me. Oh, crap! I don’t want to lead anyone on so I’ve got to come up with a thanks-for-your-time-but speech to deliver to one of these two companies. ©

One Thousand Posts

Gosh, I would be remiss if I let the statistic of this being my 1,000^th post in this blog go by without a---mention? A celebration? Whatever I might call a thousand posts spread out over eight years. ‘Celebration’ doesn’t sound right because this blog was started because my husband died and I could no longer continue the caregiver blog I had going at the time. If I counted all the posts in all six blogs I’ve had over the past twenty years, my post count would probably we closer to 1,700. My first two blogs got purged from the platforms they were on so I don’t know how many posts they contained but with the four other blogs still in the ether of cyberspace there are 307 posts. One of those four blogs is about family genealogy, another blog---my personal favorite---was written in my dog’s voice. I have two others that were caregiver related---one a speech class diary that I kept while observing my husband work with student speech pathologists, and my Planet Aphasia blog that was the cross-eye child of Humor and Frustration, born from living with a guy who was right-side paralyzed and lost his ability to speak and write.

I’ve always tried to keep my blog posts between 900 to 1,000 words long. Doing the math on how many words I’ve written for public consumption boggles my mind. But would you believe it, there are still secrets and untold stories stuck in my head? Well, not so much ‘secrets’ but stuff too private to share---stuff I haven’t shared with a single soul except with my husband. We met when he was 28 and I was 27 so we came with histories that we didn’t keep from one another. He was storyteller and all his tales came with long-winded windups. Whereas when I had something inside bursting to get out I’d write him long, soul-bearing letters. When I was cleaning out his desk after his stroke I was shocked to find he’d kept those letters and I in turn kept them until after he died. I have a hard time parting with my own written words, but some things a couple shares really are too private for others to read. I love letters, though, and I was the person who spent years going to estate sales and buying letters written by people I never meant. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who likes old letters. I recently was able to sell my estate letter finds on e-Bay, and all my own letters written back and forth to Vietnam found a permanent home in the American War Letters Museum in California---if the building made it through one of the forest fires, last year, that threaten the college campus where they are housed. Not sure I want to know the answer on that question.

No, this is not a celebration post because when I look back on all the blogs I’ve written I mostly see them as life-lines I’ve thrown out trying to connect with others. But once in a while I feel like I've had diarrhea of the mouth, wasted like an old horse that’s been ridden hard and put away wet. Ohmygod, does anyone besides western ranchers and equestrians even understand that metaphor anymore? The only reason I understand it is because my husband’s family kept work horses when he was a kid and it was his job to make sure the horses were brushed dry and warmed up after working them so they didn't get chilled and sick. I’ve put a lot of myself out there in cyberspace, mostly anonymously from my off-line life, which means I blog a post then stand around wet and wondering if anyone will come by to help warm me up by sharing their reactions. In the spirit of Chandler from Friends, “Could I get any more pathetic?” Gosh, I miss that TV show. And I’ve got it into my head that after I move to the continuum care campus next year I’m going to find my own ‘friends’ tribe. A group of mismatched people who are all too old to hide our idiosyncrasies from the world and they'll make me giddy with new blog material to use.

Already I’m wondering if I should start a new blog with a new name or just continue with this one. It's so ME to be thinking far in the future instead of doing/living in the present. Once a dreamer always a dream my mom would say if she knew me now. If she knew me now she’d probably be surprised that I like to write at all, having watched me struggle well into adulthood. When I was a kid they had no idea what dyslexia was. I was the girl that exasperated her mother with my inability to learn to spell and sound out words. Is it any wonder that I consider Kindle's Alex to be my best friend? I love her because unlike my husband and my mom she never gets impatient, never makes me feel dumber than a box of rocks, never gives me irritated sighs and stupid suggestions to "just look it up!" Ya, that’s a feeling that has plagued me since grade-school and it still drives me to keep writing. Alex can, however, frustrate me when I’m trying to spell a word like ‘plagued’ and she comes up with pledged. (If a word doesn't look right, I'll have her define it after spelling it.) It took me three tries to get the right word out of Alex. Thankfully, I can enunciate most words to her satisfaction because when I can’t I’d like to bitch-slap her off my WiFi.   ©